Where Do We Come From? Maud Newton, author of Ancestor Trouble, in conversation with Laila Lalami

WHERE DO WE COME FROM?

Maud Newton, author of Ancestor Trouble, in conversation with Laila Lalami

5pm PT / 8pm ET, Tuesday, October 18, 2022, online event

Ever since her mother explained that she’d married her father so they would have smart children, Maud Newton has felt vexed by her kin. As an adult, she spent years researching her genealogy, uncovering, among other things, ten of her grandfather’s marriages, an accused witch, and her ancestors’ roles in slavery and genocide. Her journey took her into the realms of genetics, epigenetics, and the debates over intergenerational trauma. She mulled over modernity’s dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them. Searching, moving, and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy—a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry—to expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us. Read more about Ancestor Trouble.